Face Of This Place
Wendy Taylor
What is your role at The Conservation Fund?
I’ve been with the Fund for the past 12 years and I now serve as the Director of Strategic Giving, where I focus on the Fund’s long-term strategic goals and helping our philanthropic partners make their most effective and impactful gifts. Right now my focus is raising funds for our Working Forest Fund program.
My first fundraising mentor taught me that fundraising is not about coming to people with hat in hand. It is about helping people who want to make the world a better place by matching them up with effective programs that tackle today’s most pressing challenges. I could not be prouder to now be working with donors on one of America’s most urgent conservation challenges. In fact, by protecting working forests, our donors are tackling several vital problems at once! They can make a significant impact on several fronts because working forests—forests that supply the nation’s pulp and paper products—provide an important sink for carbon, provide jobs, filter clean water and give wildlife a place to roam and call home.
How did you choose a career in conservation?
My mother took me camping when I was one month old. The rest, as they say, is history. Every childhood vacation was spent in the woods, hiking, camping and canoeing. These experiences led me to be passionate about protecting our planet. In high school I became president of the environmental club. I went on to study Environmental Communications in college and moved to Washington, DC where my first job out of college was giving away tree seedlings for planting at local schools and parks. In many ways, helping protect working forests today really feels like I have come full circle.
What are your favorite ways to enjoy the outdoors?
I still love to be outdoors with my family. My mother is now 81 and still leading hiking and canoeing trips around the country and internationally. Last summer I was thrilled to get to hike with her on land the Fund helped protect along Lake Michigan. For her 80th birthday, the whole extended family canoed with her in Florida. She is quite a role model and of course is also a Conservation Fund donor.
Why are working forests important?
To start, I'll tell you about a large expanse of working forestland the Fund is working to protect that has special meaning to my own family. My mother’s cousin owns a cabin, nicknamed the Robin, on a lake in the woods in northwestern Wisconsin. Four generations of our extended family have hiked in those woods and jumped off the tree swing into the clear lake.
In 2011, the Wausau Paper Company announced it would sell off the remainder of its holdings in Wisconsin—more than 70,000 acres. These lands not only feature globally rare pine barren habitat critical for wildlife, including the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler, but they also help protect the water quality of the region’s beloved rivers. And of tremendous importance to the whole region, these working forests are key drivers for the economy.
Across the forested regions of the country, there are many such working forests providing essential environmental benefits - clean water, climate welfare, wildlife habitat—and functioning as the backbone of the local economy. Unfortunately, each time these forests change hands, which is happening more and more often due to market forces, they risk being fragmented into ever smaller pieces. As forests become fragmented, their ability to filter our water and remove CO2 from the air is compromised, and there is less space for wildlife to live and migrate. That harms our climate, our wild places and our economy. Just like Humpty Dumpty, once our forests are broken up, nothing will help us put them back together again. We have a short window of time to protect these working forests.
Fortunately, thanks to our Working Forest Fund donors, The Conservation Fund was able to step in immediately so this precious working forest in Wisconsin was kept intact. Next we are helping over time to protect these forests and the jobs that depend on them through two working forest conservation easements so the forests will remain forests. For my extended family, this is very personal. It means all the kids staying at the Robin today and their children’s children will be able to play in these healthy forests.
What is the Working Forest Fund and how does it address the challenge of forest loss and fragmentation?
The Working Forest Fund model works in five key steps: 1) buy the land, 2) protect it with a conservation easement, 3) sustainably manage it, 4) sell it with these protections in place and 5) buy the next high priority working forest. But really it all starts with our Working Forest Fund donors who make this possible by contributing into a pool of capital we can quickly use to buy forestland when it is threatened with sale and fragmentation. We simply could not do it without them.
What is our hope for America's working forests?
We have a very short window of time to act from a conservation standpoint—the next 10-15 years—to protect America’s working forests before it is too late. We know the challenge and the deadline we are facing. And we have a real solution! Our hope is to be able to take this unprecedented model to scale in time. To succeed, we need more people, companies, and foundations to contribute and keep us going. We will do the rest.
How can people help?
Nearly 45 million acres of working forests are at risk of being lost to development. It seems like an enormous undertaking but already our Working Forest Fund has acquired and protected more than 400,000 acres. We’ve set a target of an additional 5 million acres of working forestland. These lands are the linchpin of our country’s environmental health and a driving force of our rural communities’ economies; working forests support 2.8 million jobs in the United States. Your donation could help us protect America’s working forests now and keep them from being the next Humpty Dumpty.
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